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Regarding the fidelity of a woman you love and who loves you, no cause for worry. For either she is unreservedly faithful to you--or she is cheating on you. And in the latter case, given all you know of her--or think you know--it would be such an incredible betrayal, such a spiritual disillusionment, that it would be a real negative proof of the existence of God!
wow
[...] The male pole position being virtually unoccupied (since man has virtually disappeared), the feminists are in an enormous hurry to move into it, and they naturally fall into the trap that is the void of power itself. In the same way, political power being emptied of its substance, the Left rushed to seize it and immediately disintegrated in the void.
Hysteresia.
Those who continue to vote although there are no more candidates.
Those who continue to watch television when the broadcasters are on strike.
The phantom limb which goes on hurting even after it is amputated.
The man who is made redundant but goes regularly to his former place of work every morning.
The Japanese stubbornly contemplating the sunset at Ayer's Rock even though there is no sun.
The tightrope-walker who keeps edging forward on his imaginary rope until he realizes it is not there and falls into the void.
The subject who takes himself for a subject even though he disappeared long ago.
Annoyed at having first to turn his pullovers the right side out every time he puts them on, he decides to turn them around as soon as he has taken them off. Surely, this is rational. But since this decision does not override the decision automatically to turn out his pullover when he puts it on, he unfailingly ends up with it the wrong side out. A dilemma: how is one to rationalize an act without disturbing one's automatic behaviour? And things are even worse if, faced with this failure, one resolves to give up the innovation, since the old practice is then immediately disrupted too, being no longer spontaneous and infallible. The situation created is a hopeless tangle. The lesson of all this: all clothing should be reversible. Ideas, too, so that one could slip into them from any side.
this is incredible
In this land of perpetual wind and drought, the silent humidity is an event when all the elements are merged in an indistinct, hepatic luminosity, instead of the clarity of light which usually prevails. All the winds have dropped, and the fire of the sky is shrouded i mist. You can no longer even hear the grass growing, as you are said to do in legend. An autumn day in the middle of summer, a day which never broke and lasts for an eternity: until ten o'clock at night.
unexpectedly poetic
Responding to an enquiry about his cultural perspectives in the years immediately after the Second World War, Williams comments:
I thought that the Labour government had a choice: either for reconstruction of the cultural field in capitalist terms, or for funding institutions of popular education and popular culture that could have withstood the political campaigns in the bourgeois press that were already gathering momentum. In fact, there was a rapid option for conventional capitalist priorities; the refusal to finance the documentary film movement was an example. I still believe that the failure to fund the working-class movement culturally when the channels of popular education and popular culture were there in the forties became a key factor in the
very quick disintegration of Labour's position in the fifties. [...]
Negri's practising of this method in the 1970s was predicated on accepting and radicalising the crisis of the Fordist social compact to license a thinking of the imminent and immanent apocalypse of capitalist relations. If capitalism started to rupture the structure of the factory and guaranteed employment then one should not regret this and go backwards to some lost world of social democracy, but push the tendency further into exodus, sabotage, and destruction of the 'fetters' of the remnants of Fordism. This is a form of the accelerationism of struggles.
The implication of his work, reflecting on the crisis of Fordism and its 'planner-state', was that communism had already arrived and would need to simply be realized. [...]
in his 1971 Crisis of the Planner-State
The idea of the tracks stretching into the future leaves revolution as a receding moment--the station we never quite arrive in. The result, contra to the revolutionary intervention, it is the constant stoking of the train, i.e. the capitalist productive forces. This is another instance of accelerationism, which either tries to actively increase the speed of capital, or simply because the passenger on the train, allowing the constant destruction of living labor at the hands of dead labor to do the work.
The conclusion is that the emergency brake is not merely calling to a halt for the sake of it, some static stopping at a particular point in capitalist history (say Swedish Social Democracy--which the American Republican Right now takes as the true horror of 'socialism'). Neither is it a return back to some utopian pre-capitalist moment, which would fall foul of Marx and Engels's anathemas against 'feudal socialism'. Rather, Benjamin argues that: 'Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption.' We interrupt to prevent catastrophe, we destroy the tracks to prevent the greater destruction of acceleration.
A working solution, to be deliberately ironic, is to struggle for decommodification of our lives. Campaigns against privatization and for the return of privatized services to public control try to reduce our dependence on work by attacking the way work is supposed to account for all of our self-reproduction. These struggles are in parallel for struggles to defend public services, protect benefits, and sustain social and collective forms of support. While they may be unglamorous, especially compared to space travel, these struggles can negate the conditions of the impossibility of work by trying to detach 'work' from its ideological and material role as the validation of citizenship and existence. In relation to the Nietzschean rebels of absolute communism or absolute acceleration these struggles can be dismissed as reactive, but they react precisely to the contradiction in which we are currently bound.
Everywhere abstraction reigns, abstraction made concrete. Everywhere abstraction's straight lines and pure curves order matters along complex but efficient vectors. But where education teaches what one may produce with an abstraction, the knowledge most useful for the hacker class is of how abstractions are themselves produced. Deleuze: "Abstractions explain nothing, they themselves have to be explained."